Apple scored the $30 million contract from the L.A. Unified School District this week, which will deploy iPads to all students throughout 47 campuses.

The Board of Education voted 6 to 0 on Tuesday to approve the contract after receiving positive input about iPad use from teachers and students. The iPad was also the least expensive device.

The L.A. Unified School District is paying $678 per iPad, which will come pre-loaded with educational software, but won't include a keyboard.

The school district also committed to spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" with Apple over the next two years, since they chose the company as their only tablet vendor.

The iPads have a three-year warranty that includes free replacement devices up to 5 percent of the value of the purchase price.

The $30 million for Apple's iPads is a steep contract price, but the L.A. district insisted on the measure because new state and national tests will be taken on computers, and it doesn't want its students falling behind on computer skills. Also, the software will help students in the classroom and after school for studying.

However, there are many concerns floating around the new agreement with Apple. Chief Strategy Officer Matt Hill complained that the funding came from facility bonds, which could have been used for construction instead. The teachers union wanted the money to be used for the hiring of new teachers.

Aside from school staff and officials, Microsoft has a beef to pick with the L.A. Unified School District too, and I bet you can guess why. That's right -- it wants its Surface tablets to be adopted by school districts so that students start using the Windows operating system early, and this will hopefully lead to loyalty to the OS as they upgrade over the years.

Robyn Hines, senior director of state government affairs for Microsoft, said that using only one platform throughout the district would limit options, such as innovations/price cuts from other companies and students' ability to learn platforms they'd find in the workplace (such as Windows).

Last week, Microsoft announced that it was giving away 10,000 Surface RT tablets to teachers at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE). The idea was to spread RT adoption in schools by supplying teachers with the devices and even training them how to use it. Microsoft is also expected to announce its "Microsoft Surface for education limited time offer" this month, which will offer $199 Surface RTs (normally retails for $499) to schools and colleges interested in adopting the tablets. If the schools want a touch keyboard with their Surface RT, the total price is $249 (retail $599) and with a type keyboard, the cost is $289 (retail $629).

Apple has been making its way into classrooms around the U.S. for years now. In 2011, Maine spent $200,000 to supply its kindergarteners with iPads. Later that year, the iPad entered other elementary schools, such as a third-grade classroom in Millstone, New Jersey.

Aside from the $30,000 L.A. Unified School District contract, Apple is using other ways to pull kids into its platform early: Apple Camp.

Apple Camp is a three-day, creative workshop for children ages 8-12. It will be held at Apple Retail Stores, and allows kids to film footage and create songs using iMovie and GarageBand on a Mac. After the three days are complete, the children present their work at the Apple Camp Film Festival.

A number of tablets were piloted, but students and teachers like and want iPads. Yes, there are no doubt spec sheets and feature lists that favour other tablets, but fundamentally users prefer the iPad. If the school board had gone ahead and bought Android or Windows tablets that students and teachers don't want to and perhaps even won't use, then that would have been a real waste of money.

And Apple has had a program where owners of older iPads can give them back to Apple for refurbishment and subsequent free donation to schools in low-income areas.

No kidding. Is there any evidence at all that indicates that kids/teachers didn't select the iThing simply because the teevee has educated them that it's the cool thing to have and they need the one with the bigger geebees?

Schools should be teaching valuable skills that will help our kids succeed in the real world. D1cking around with an iPad isn't giving any such skills, and the expenditure is a total boondoggle.

I, for one, am happy those kids got what they wanted. It will give them fond memories of good times. Where they could learn and be cool at the same time. The games played between them and how it bonded them with their friends etc.

Because let's face it. These kids are most likely not going to have a job later. They for damn sure won't have a pension. Most likely, they'll have to do some menial back breaking labor that doesn't require an ipad or an education, just to send their own kids to some overcrowded school with 50 kids per teacher because it's all the government can afford and they can't afford the private schools not with $100,000+ in student debt they're still paying off.

Those are highschool kids right? Means they'll go to college around 1-2 years from now and graduate in ~8 years from now. The national debt today is $16,8 trillion. The national debt in 2005 was ~$8 trillion. Assuming it continues at the same rate, in 8 years time, it will be $32,3 trillion. GDP 8 years ago was $12,6 trillion, today it's $15,7 trillion, in 8 years it will be ~$19,6 trillion.

So when these kids graduate and are ready to enter the workforce, Debt to GDP will be at 160% GDP, or the same as Greece. And rising. And that's only assuming things will continue to be just as bad as they are now. Which is impossible considering the US is already in worse shape then the worst of the doomsday predictions back from 2005-2006, so it'll be in much worse shape again in 8 years then we're imagining now.

In 2005 the fed interest rate was climbing up to 5% in late 2006. If you hit that 5% again today, servicing the national debt will cost you ~$1 trillion a year (that's servicing not paying off or rolling over). The historical average is 6,68%.

No, i say, while the good times are still here i hope they can enjoy it. They won't for much longer.

quote: Those are highschool kids right? Means they'll go to college around 1-2 years from now and graduate in ~8 years from now. The national debt today is $16,8 trillion. The national debt in 2005 was ~$8 trillion. Assuming it continues at the same rate, in 8 years time, it will be $32,3 trillion. GDP 8 years ago was $12,6 trillion, today it's $15,7 trillion, in 8 years it will be ~$19,6 trillion.

Your numbers are always off and biased. You're assuming that we will have a massive war one after another. I can bend statistics in my favor fairly easily.

Part of Quantitative Research and writing a case study is accounting for many variables and factors/events that can influenced your results. You seem to miss that whole part. If everything is on a linear path, then we only need one economist in an entire country.

And your reading comprehension is as shoddy as always. I already said my own numbers are wrong and it will be worse in reality.

Just like the *exponentially based* doomsday predictions from 2005, turned out to be even worse.

I gave the best scenario because you won't even belive the worst case. Here it is: The top 5 US banks alone have a derivates exposure of $222 trillion.

Social security and medicare liabilities until 2075 (so which these kids will pay for) amount to another $122 trillion.

I spoke about the national debt, but not the TOTAL US debt. Total US debt was around $33 trillion 8 years ago. Now it's around $60 trillion, another $5 trillion higher then it was in 2008. Linearily, it'll hit ~$110 trillion in 8 years.

Student loan debt has doubled from ~$500 billion to $1 trillion in 8 years. Tuition fees have also doubled since then, atleast.

The fed monetised 78,8% of ALL US treasuries in 2012. They're on track to hit 100% by 2018. At 100% you're effectively the only person buying your own debt and all confidence in your ability to pay back is lost, making hyperinflation the only awnser.

The real worst case scenario can hardly be belived. It's total social economical collapse. These kids will not be doing some menial job, they will be killing eachother over scraps of food! In fact, if the EBT system fails for a month, this would already be the case!

Oh, and i don't have to write a case study on this. Others have. How do you think i got all this info?

"Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be." -- Steve Ballmer